Blockbuster--Caitlin McCormack
In Blockbuster, fiber artist Caitlin McCormack posits film as a portal to the past, a nostalgic lens that unifies fact and fiction, and through which variants of one’s identity may be accessed. Drawing from the unavailability of consistent television and video access prior to McCormack’s teenage years, these meticulously crafted fiber sculptures represent both superficial and intimate fascinations with the sublime. An insatiable yet secretive hunger for the grotesque is evident in each object’s devoutly hand-wrought construction. Reappropriating the vernacular of pornography, horror, goth, and metal fandom, these works explore relationships between externalized and internalized violence through the eyes of an adolescent femme. Through humor and satire, with undercurrents of folklore, animism, and commercially-driven, millennial subculture kitsch, Blockbuster’s innocent bedroom harbors a sinister edge, presenting burgeoning fixations on the obscene as implied through verbal cues and juvenile, domestic set pieces. These works reveal an unspoken language intimating hidden traumas, boundaries crossed, and nascent carnal awareness.
Bio:
Caitlin McCormack (b. 1988) is a Philadelphia-based fiber artist whose crocheted works explore sexuality, death, the pros and cons of isolation, and Anthropocene hamartia through an uncanny lens, These works contemplate societal reluctance to view gendered craft as art and regard crochet as a behavioral response to apocalyptic conditions. Evoking folklore, medieval botanical imagery, institutional osteological displays, sci-fi and cinematic body horror, each object is an artifact of a memory, tethered to a surface and made viewable from a distance.
McCormack has contributed works to solo and group exhibitions at The Mütter Museum (PA), Museum Rijswijk (NL), The Mesa Contemporary Art Museum (AZ), The Taubman Museum of Art (VA), Hashimoto Contemporary (NYC/CA), The Fort Wayne Museum of Art (IN), Feinkünst Krüger (Hamburg), Vanilla Gallery (Tokyo), Rhodes Contemporary (London), Field Projects (NYC), and SPRING/BREAK Art Show in NYC. McCormack held a teaching position at PAFA, completed artist residencies at ChaNorth (NY), The Peter Bullough Foundation (VA), and The Wassaic Project (NY), and was the 2021 recipient of a Joseph Robert Foundation grant.